Thursday, June 1, 2017

New NTSC Shaders

NTSC simulation/emulation is a tough nut to crack. There's a lot of math involved, and the results are very dependent on games/content having the correct resolution or else the effect falls apart. Themaister's NTSC shader does a fantastic job with both 256- and 320-pixel-wide content, which covers most modern-ish retro consoles, including S/NES, Genesis, PS1 and N64, and it handles content of arbitrary resolutions pretty well. Nevertheless, it's always good to have variety, so I was excited to find some other shaders that included different takes on the NTSC signal problem.

This splitscreen image demonstrates just how mind-boggling this effect can be, taking a 1-bit black and white image and ending up with bright colors:

RGB output on the left, composite artifact output on the right. Those colors are all generated by the signal modulation :O

And here's an animated gif that cycles between the typical limited-palette RGB output and the full-color artifact-color version (half RGB and half composite artifact back and forth):

Notice how the magenta and black stripes turn to a rich brown

In porting this shader, I tried to make runtime parameters out of as many variables as possible because it's such a cool thing to see how they affect the emergent colors in real-time. One such parameter is the F_COL variable, which can be used to basically have another color palette that you can switch to.

I also made a preset that pairs it with T. Lottes' CRT shader, which is perfectly suited to CGA content:

I called this one c64-monitor in the 'presets' subdirectory of the shader repos

I made the presets force a 640-pixel width, since that seems to be the sweet spot for this shader, which isn't surprising seeing as many of the games that relied on artifact coloring used a 640x200 mode. I'm not very familiar with any of the classic computer cores that could take advantage of this shader, but I'd love to hear comments from anyone who gives them a shot.

This preset also looks pretty darn good for general use, though it does a strange green/magenta strobe thing on Sonic's waterfalls and probably other pseudo-transparency:

CRTSim

This one from J. Kyle Pittman / PirateHearts is similar to the CRT effect in You Have To Win the Game:

It doesn't try to be accurate, it just looks nice and runs fast. While it does the whole bevy of old TV effects, including a really nice per-channel color persistence that can be used to reproduce the characteristic red smear of a failing CRT, my favorite part of it is the LUT-based NTSC effect. It uses a simple texture of diagonal colored lines:

This looks gray, but it's actually red, green and blue diagonal lines

and mixes it in with the main image based on differences in brightness between each pixel and its neighbors. For such a simple concept, the result is very convincing, and it even does a reasonable job of "passing" the NTSC crosstalk test-ROM (with certain settings):

Also of interest with this shader is the choice of permissive public domain licensing, so people can integrate it into their games and other programs without fear of licensing conflicts.

Both of these shaders are available in RetroArch's regular GLSL and slang/Vulkan formats. Artifact Colors is also available in RetroArch's Cg format and for ReShade, courtesy of user Matsilagi, who has also ported a number of other RetroArch shaders to ReShade. On-topic but not pictured are two NTSC shaders derived from MAME's NTSC shader implementation, one multipass and one single-pass. I haven't gotten them to work properly in GLSL format, only slang, and all of my Vulkan screenshots have their red and blue channels swapped for some reason right now, so I couldn't share any shots of them. You can get a taste from their shadertoy implementation, though.